Why the national obsession over a million dollars? It didn’t take Regis Philbin to make “Who wants to be a millionaire?” a rhetorical question. A seven-figure sum has always looked attractive. But now, thanks to rising real-estate values and the turbo-charged stock market, it’s an attainable marker for success. Roughly half of all Americans are invested in the market these days, and stock holdings have replaced politics, weather and sports as the go-to conversational icebreaker. More than four out of every 100 households has a net worth of a million bucks or more, and many more are well on their way. While greed got a bad rap in the ’80s, in this incarnation it’s good, clean family fun, even a game show. Publishers say that makes for a promising, and growing, category of books. “A lot more people are becoming aware of their potential wealth,” said Tom Thornton, president of Andrews McMeel, publisher of “The Millionaire Mind.”
“These books are really modern religious manuals. They tell us how to be virtuous,” says Paul Schervish, a sociology professor at Boston College. Schervish adds that part of the appeal of the game show is its rules–it takes real effort and some brains to get on the show, and contestants can get help from family, friends and the audience as they work their way up the money ladder. “The program re-enacts every key ingredient of the American path to fortune,” Schervish says.
The simple advice in many millionaire books about the value of saving is not a sermon everyone wants to hear. People are often disappointed to learn that becoming a millionaire requires giving up the stereotypical trappings of a fat-cat millionaire and hunkering down with a long-term savings and budgeting plan. “A lot of people don’t want to go near this book–it makes them sick,’’ says “The Millionaire Mind” author Stanley. “It’s applied common sense, but most people don’t have common sense.” (More medicine is on the way–Stanley is writing a new book about women who are self-made millionaires.) Certainly, some of the advice can be downright discouraging for people who haven’t been socking away big chunks of their paychecks into retirement plans since their 20s. For example, here’s a guideline from Stanley’s book for calculating the size of the nest egg you should have built up by now if you hope to eventually join the ranks of the millionaire next door: multiply your age by your pretax household annual income. Divide by 10. This figure, not including any inherited wealth, is what your net worth should be (take heart, the average household net worth in this country is somewhere around $60,000).
But why shoot for just a million? Perhaps you should aim higher and try to become the billionaire next door. There’s even a new book to help you get there: “How to Be a Billionaire: Proven Strategies From the Titans of Wealth,” by Martin S. Fridson. It illuminates the path to great riches with surprising insights about the value of hard work, learning from your mistakes and breaking rules. Oh, yes. It also counsels that frugality pays, though that presumably does not refer to buying books.
